Isaiah Fontenot

You are standing in Samir Khoury's kitchen in Pittsburgh, and the coffee is going cold in his big square hand. You have been him for under a minute. The window over his sink is the grey of dishwater, and the street hasn't started. He has a beauty mark you keep finding with your tongue, a habit of his mouth, and a beard that smells of someone else's soap.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. You stood here and waited for the wanting to go quiet, and it didn't. It sits under the sternum like a held note. His body works. It's tired in the knees and slow to warm, a body that would carry you gently into a long, ordinary life, and you cannot stand the gentleness. You put the cup down. You open the page, the wheel is already turning, and you pay.

Heat, then the sink.

Water is running over your wrist, and the brush stops mid-stroke against the left side of your jaw. Foam is on your lip. The bulbs over the mirror are hot on your forehead. You start the brush again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because the back molars are what you have.

The floor is cold tile under bare feet. Your weight sits low and square. Thirty-nine years of lifting settle in the thighs and the lower back, with a dull ache at the base of the spine that is simply the cost of the trade. The sink's cold porcelain edge is under your left palm, and the ring on that hand clicks against it.

That click opens something. A woman's laugh, a kitchen, the ring going on, and a nervousness he'd felt like a swallowed stone. Then it is gone.

The shirt is soft and thin against your shoulders, washed a hundred times. You feel him pulling it off the chair in the dark so as not to wake anyone, sleeve first, right arm, then left. He had stood a second in the hallway listening to two children breathing behind a door. A small hand had once pressed a drawing into his palm. It was a house with a sun and a brick wall, and the bricks were drawn as careful rectangles. He kept it. It is in his truck, above the visor.

You rinse. The water in the sink is grey, and you rinse again. The brush goes bristles-up in the cup beside the other brushes, a pink one, a green one, and the stand of it is an old courtesy you didn't choose.

Your thumb goes to your mouth. The nail is already bitten to the quick, and your teeth know exactly where to start. Under it comes a scaffold at first light, the cold of a trowel handle, mortar slumping off the blade in a grey tongue, and a wall rising a course at a time while the sagebrush smell comes in on the wind. A man who has never needed to talk about it. A beer he stopped drinking, and the exact morning, and the sound of the can going into the bin. Another woman's name, an old one, held carefully, never spoken in the house. The trailer shudders when the wind leans on it.

You lift the hand and turn it over. The scar through the eyebrow tugs when you frown at it. The palm is hard, the knuckles thick, and you are already wondering how long.

You look up into the mirror and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello, Isaiah."